There’s a moment in John Carney’s Flora and Son that might feel thrillingly familiar for fans of his breakthrough musical romance Once. A man and a woman are finding connection via music, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jeff showing Eve Hewson’s Eve, via Zoom guitar lessons, the power of a song to express emotion. There’s an unspoken charge between the two of them, even through a computer screen, and the audience feels it too — until Flora breaks the spell. She asks Jeff if he’s coming on to her, and he’s so flabbergasted he shuts the whole lesson down.
That moment feels a bit like Carney making fun of his own reputation as spinner of delicate, music-driven romances, from Once to Begin Again to his poppy coming-of-age film Sing Street. But as he tells is, Flora’s impulse to take the air out of any sincere moment is something he shares, as do many people in his native Dublin. And that impishenss does nothing to diminish the emotional heft of Flora and Son, a quasi-long-distance-romance betewen Flora and Jeff that’s really, as the title suggests, about Flora and her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) finding a connection to each other through music.
Flora and Son premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and made its way to the Toronto Film Festival this month; it opens in theaters on September 22 and comes to Apple TV+ a week later. With his magnetic cast on strike Carney finds himself unexpectedly the lone ambassador for the film on the press circuit, but he’s also comfortable digging into the film’s very personal origins — Flora is based on his own mother, and Max on his own teenage years — and why he, like Jeff, is willing to embrace music snobbery.
Listen to Carney on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, and find a partial transcript of the conversation below.
Vanity Fair: When you were doing press for Sing Street, I think, you said something like that it might have been your last musical, and thinking of it as a triptych with the films you’d made before. I don’t think Flora and Son is a musical by any standard, but it does seem like music kind of pulled you back when you thought you were out. How was that process actually for you?
John Carney: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I believe in life, so I keep on banging on about it, and there’s a little audience for it, which is great. So as long as that is happening, I still will try and explore musical themes. And you’re right, they’re not musicals. They are musically themed stories, often about people for whom music kind of makes up for something missing in their life. I’m a firm believer in that. It’s happened to me numerous times in my life, that music has bridged something that I’ve needed and allowed me to cross over to something that I feel like I’ve needed.
It’s a movie about somebody who discovers that music doesn’t just come from like a DJ putting down a needle drop, but that it actually has an organic starting point, which is an instrument usually made of wood and steel and wire and pegs and mother of pearl and all these elements from the earth. It’s an amazing gift to get, to get music.
You’ve said that the character of Flora really comes from your mother in some ways, that this is a tribute to her. Was that the starting point for this film entirely, that you were thinking of your mom? Did it start with the character of Flora? Did it start with the idea of a mother and son?
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